Data loss puts Gitmo Cole case on hold

Apr. 11, 2013 - 01:44PM
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WASHINGTON — An upcoming session of the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals has been postponed amid defense complaints that a Pentagon computer failure and mishandled emails may have compromised their work.

A military judge on Thursday postponed until June a hearing scheduled for next week. It's for a prisoner accused of plotting the deadly al-Qaida attack on the Cole, and his lawyers raised the alleged breach.

The chief defense counsel for the military tribunals at the U.S. base in Cuba, meanwhile, has ordered defense lawyers to stop using the Department of Defense email system for legal matters until security issues are resolved.

Lawyers say a server failure resulted in at least the temporary loss of thousands of pages of documents and that many of their emails were improperly turned over to prosecutors.